I often forget that the genre of the essay exists outside of college coursework. And so, when essays astound me, they do so with an element of surprise, the joyous surprise of discovering words that can finally express some thought or feeling that I haven’t been able to express. James Baldwin did this for me. His line to his nephew, “to be committed is to be in danger,” has reminded me that I’m never going to be able to escape the pos- sibility of getting hurt, so I might as well live despite that possibility and in defiance of that possibility. The words have buttressed me when I’ve needed buttressing. Though it didn’t express thoughts that I had no way to express, Adrienne Rich’s essay “Split at the Root” expressed thoughts that I hadn’t thought of before. I return to their words. The work that essays can do continually astounds me.
It did so again a couple of weeks ago, when I found Oliver Sacks’ new book, Gratitude, in a bookshop one evening.
Over a couple of hours, I read the neurologist’s book of essays. He died at 82 from cancer in August of last year, having sent the last several months of his life writing. Though he was a neurologist, I know him for his beautifully written essays. This slim volume collects four of them, which he wrote in the last couple of years of his life.
I cried starting it. It opens with a piece called “Mercury” that I had read a couple of years ago when the New York Times printed it under the title “The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.)” Starting it again, and just thinking about gratitude and Sacks’ gratitude and how, sometimes, the world is beautiful – as Sacks seems, to my mind, to pay homage to in this book – I teared up. It felt good to cry a little. Sometimes the world is beautiful. At other points he made me laugh out loud.
Sacks faces endings in these pages, and faces appraising those endings, often through reference to the periodic table, which he loved. The first essay, in which he looks to his eighties with joy, starts: “Last night I dreamed about mercury – huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.”
Though he writes about his cancer and his elements and his life, he doesn’t do so in a self-indulgent way. Rather, he approaches his own impending death, and his life, by considering the humanity of the individual human being. “There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate … of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death,” he writes. This focus on the individual lends his essays at least some of their power, avoiding as it does the potential for clumsy, grandiose generalizations that an unmanageably large scope – say, humankind – might not. He thanks individuals’ humanity. “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return[.] … I have had an intercourse with the world. … Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” At one point, he writes that “the future is in good hands.” It’s quite a statement coming from him.
Acknowledging the personal violence inherent in even the most natural of deaths and endings, he writes, “Each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself.” But he chooses to focus on something else: on beauty, and on love – and on these things despite and in defiance of this violence (much like Baldwin does, as a matter of fact). When Sacks “[sees] the entire sky ‘powdered with stars,’” he connects that “celestial splendor,” “the heavens’ beauty,” with “life” and “transience.” He tells friends that it is this beauty that “‘[he] would like to see … again when [he is] dying.’”
His relationship with religion was also a navigation between violence and a sort of beauty. Though he grew up Jewish, he eventually left organized religion in part because of its “capacity for bigotry and cruelty.” But he re- turns to it, in a way, near the close of his life and this book, when he shares a Sabbath meal with devout friends. About that experience he writes, “The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything.” The book ends with this peace, with the word “rest.” Sacks writes, “I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”
When I learned of his death, I chose to remember him for the humanity of his writing. There’s a certain resonance, I realize now, with the very best teachings of religions in the humanity, love, and gratitude that he expresses in these essays. I think that that is why I am drawn to him so much, and why, as he hoped, his words might resonate with people after his death: because he is able, to the very end and despite his fear of the end, to express a communal, collective love. •
